MULLAHS AND MACHINE GUNS 157enemy in a superb position, Gurkhas, Punjabis and Highlanders routed
the Afghan force, which was pursued by the renowned Bengal Lancers.
At the same time, General Browne’s Peshawar Valley Field Force sur-
rounded and destroyed another Afghan regular force in the Khyber Pass.
With the British armies in possession of the country, the new king, Yakub
Khan, accepted the facts of life and Afghanistan became a British depen-
dency. This treaty was unpopular with the tribesmen, though, and by sum-
mer of 1879, the British resident had been killed and a punitive expedition
under Lord Roberts returned to Kabul—only to be besieged itself in De-
cember of that year. The Afghan mullahs whipped the tribesmen into a
frenzy and many attacked the fortified British compound, but 7,000 dis-
ciplined British and Indian troops mowed them down in waves.
This victory at Kabul over the tribal hosts might have ensured accep-
tance, but in the summer of 1880, the country rose again and an Anglo-
Indian infantry brigade, complete with cavalry and guns, was massacred
at Kandahar by Ayub Khan’s regulars, well supported by the frenzied
tribesmen. This victory was not to bear fruit, for Lord Roberts’s force
marched his division from Kabul to Kandahar in twenty-one days, and on
August 31, 1880, crushed the Afghan forces. After this last action of the
Second Afghan War British influence was firmly established, and Russian
denied. The years to come brought much more fighting aslashkars(raid-
ing parties from various mountains tribes) swept into British-protected
areas. As late as the 1930s frontier fighting involved British forces with
tanks and bombers attacking the Mohmands of the Ganhab Valley, who
were considered in rebellion against the occupying forces. So common
were these conflicts that several generations of British and Indian soldiers
learned much of the art of war from the fierce mountain warriors.
Perhaps the most remarkable of the colonial episodes occurred in Egypt.
Long since a nominal vassal of the Ottoman Empire, the North African
state had for centuries been a power unto itself. Although it had sunk into
obscurity in the middle nineteenth century, Cairo would soon become a
vital city and an important target of colonialism.
In the 1820s Egypt had marched an army south along the Nile and
occupied the Sudan. A vast area, sparsely cultivated, with little commerce
save slavery, the country and its tribal people grudgingly accepted the
corrupt Egyptian governors sent to oversee them. This done, the Sudan
rapidly became a forgotten backwater of a slumbering nation. A series of
events would move first Egypt and then the Sudan into the center of British
colonial attentions.
In 1854 Ferdinand de Lesseps, working from a survey of Egypt done
by Napoleon’s military engineers in 1798, signed an agreement with the